6/10/2023 0 Comments Are wrestling fans too smarky nowMaybe, as my good friend Tommy Craggs says, I need to accept that it’s all a work (wrestling lingo for “fake”) and, along with thousands of other disgruntled fans, just get over it.Įxcept there’s a part of wrestling that’s real, a part that makes it play by somewhat different rules than Game of Thrones, where George R.R. Maybe I sound like a super-fan lost in the soap opera of pro wrestling. The hashtag #cancelWWENetwork, a reference to the $US10-a-month WWE streaming service that lets you watch special events like the Rumble and that is the foundation of the WWE’s current business model, has been trending worldwide for nearly a day.įans were furious, and it doesn’t seem like we were supposed to be. Twitter blew up with anger over the ending. Viewers like me watching at home hated it. It’s just that they wanted this guy to win: But then Reigns gets some offence in and it’s clear as day what the crowd actually thinks is “bullshit” about all of this. The chant here is “bullshit”, and The Big Show tries to play it off as if it comports with the storyline. The man with the long black hair is Roman Reigns, relative of all-time-great The Rock and an emerging bad-arse babyface (wrestling parlance for “good guy” bad guys are “heels”). The two bald guys in the clip are storyline bad guys, the Big Show and Kane, both employees for the corporate Authority. The winner of the match gets to challenge for the world heavyweight championship at Wrestlemania, so think of the Rumble as a weird variation of an NFL conference finals. They are the final three guys in the eponymous Royal Rumble match, a 30-man battle-royale in which you’re eliminated when you are thrown over the top rope. There was this chant from some 17,000 fans in Philadelphia… They didn’t just boo almost the entire final half of the match he was in. It was also the second straight Royal Rumble that ended in a blizzard of boos from an arena crowd fuming when the winner was a storyline good guy who just about all of them rejected.Īnd they didn’t just boo the guy who won. Sunday night’s Royal Rumble was the ostensible kick-off of pro wrestling’s high season, one that culminates in WWE’s Super-Bowl-scale Wrestlemania in spring. Welcome to one of the strangest fan experiences in popular entertainment: being a masochistic fan of WWE. Of course, our real problem is that we stick around and take it. My problem - and the problem of thousands of WWE fans - is that the biggest pro wrestling company in the world has, for quite some time, weirdly promoted its product in a way that appears to be spiteful to many of its fans. If I was going, I sure would have been angry, and I’d have let them know it. But the many inches of snow aimed at Hartford, Connecticut, the location of tonight’s now-scuttled Raw taping, are a sprinkle of luck that will spare WWE the heat of some pretty pissed off fans. You’d think that the first weather-related cancellation of an episode of Monday Night Raw in the show’s 1000-plus episode history would be bad news for the WWE.
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